A dim morning.
I was inside the council room once again.
It was to decide which paladin Drik would face in the paladin's trial.
"There are not many I know to begin with."
Inside the council room were only myself, Drik, and the chapter master.
It was not a gathering meant for exchanging opinions; the matter would be settled the moment Drik picked one paladin and gave the chapter master word of it.
The conversation between the two felt distant, as though submerged underwater.
For the past few days, nothing had held my attention.
I turned my head toward the window.
Through the running rainwater, a gloomy sky was visible.
The sound of rain drumming against the translucent glass was loud.
'What am I doing?'
It had certainly begun as something I did for Eladin.
I destroyed the Luxeon Cult's chapters, time flowed on, and eventually a century passed.
When I sat slumped atop the ashes of the last chapter, I no longer understood anything at all.
What am I to do now?
If this revenge was truly for Eladin's sake, then I have no reason left to live, do I?
Instead of accepting that fact, I wandered on out of sheer inertia, chasing nothing but traces of Luxeon.
As long as the revenge went unfinished, I could keep from feeling the emptiness, the futility.
Eladin's face flickered before my eyes.
I closed my eyes.
Do I, who spent a century desperately turning away from that fact, have any right to recall her now?
The rain drumming at the window still had not let up.
Within it, Drik and the chapter master's talk was now rushing toward its final curtain.
"......In truth, it is an obvious question. I will take Camilla Rosette."
"Are you truly certain?"
Drik had named Camilla as his opponent for the trial.
He had several reasons of his own.
For instance, that Camilla was the paladin he was most familiar with, or that she already regarded him favorably.
Though the greatest reason among them was surely that he wanted to land a hit on Camilla.
After Drik and the chapter master's conversation ended, in the colonnade outside the central tower.
I stood still, watching the drizzle spill down past the eaves.
The damp smell of earth seeped in through the gaps of my iron helm.
"What is all this moping about?"
The owner of the voice was Kallen.
He stood at the other end of the colonnade, smiling amiably.
"It's nothing."
"It's hardly nothing."
Kallen came to my side and stretched a hand out past the eaves.
"It's cold out. Are you not cold, sir knight?"
"......Are you concerned I might freeze to death?"
Droplets struck Kallen's arm and burst apart.
Kallen watched the sight quietly.
"It's just, you don't seem yourself."
"......."
Had I been sunk in other thoughts deeply enough for Kallen to notice at a glance?
I shook my head lightly, casting off the damp.
"Why do you think that?"
"Because I was the same. On the day my younger brother closed his eyes, I too stared outside for hours on end."
Kallen's younger brother.
He had been dragged into the Slonhar-Darvar territorial war and came back having lost a leg.
In the end that wound festered and he departed this life, if I recalled correctly.
"It is spiteful, is it not?"
How spiteful a thing fate is.
What killed his brother was the territorial war, and standing at its vanguard had been none other than the Talios Order.
Well-clothed and well-fed now beside his family's enemy, just what does Kallen feel as he stands in this place?
"......Kallen."
"Yes, sir knight."
"I'm sorry."
No, the spiteful one was me.
The one who struck down Kallen's comrades, the one who dragged him all the way here, was not fate but me.
Blaming fate is nothing more than an act of fleeing from guilt.
"I did not bring it up to hear an apology."
Kallen smiled bitterly.
He lightly shook out his rain-soaked arm.
"A sense of loss is not the emotion you feel when something disappears. It is the emotion you feel when the absence of what is gone truly sinks in."
Is this thing I am feeling a sense of loss?
Having lost Eladin, now that even the revenge is over, am I only now registering her absence?
"Sir knight. Lately I have been feeling an enormous sense of loss."
Kallen turned his head.
The two eyes fixed on me were stiller than they had ever been.
"You do not look any different from me in that, sir knight."
I quietly closed my eyes.
I simply stood there and felt the cold within the drizzle.
"Perhaps so."
It is a strange thing.
Merely feeling the cold meant I was no longer cold.
"You've been hard to find lately."
"I've been run off my feet. These past few days I haven't set foot in my quarters once."
"If the guard corps works you too hard, tell me."
"Are you going to put in a word for me, sir knight?"
"I'll give them a sharp scolding."
Kallen laughed softly.
That Kallen, busy as he was, had finally come back meant one thing.
"So the search has turned something up?"
"Yes. We collared him this morning."
Findel Morein.
The truth of him had only just come within my grasp.
***
The inner keep at the heart of the outer ward, and the central tower at the heart of that.
Deep underground even within it.
The heresy interrogation chamber.
These were the words Kallen offered as we stepped over its threshold.
"Things have gotten a little tangled."
"What do you mean?"
"The upshot is that Findel is not here."
By Kallen's explanation, they had sealed off the commercial district and the farming district and combed every corner of the residential district, yet there was no one who resembled Findel.
So they had shifted the search toward eyewitness testimony, and had turned up a coachman who claimed to have once taken on a passenger presumed to be Findel Morein.
"Divine power was detected on the coachman, apparently. From a god other than Talios."
"Luxeon, then."
High bishops capable of wielding divine power were not common.
The mere fact that another god's aura had surfaced within Talios's domain made Findel Morein's involvement a certainty.
"Because we had to neutralize the divine power while interrogating him, gathering the information ran a little late. I haven't heard the full account myself yet, either."
In the end, close to a fortnight had been wasted for nothing.
Kallen pushed the heavy iron door.
A man's voice came through, forcing its way past the sound of rusted hinges.
"......That is all I know."
"The divine power is no longer reacting either."
The man who appeared to be the coachman was bound to a chair, with several priests gathered in a ring around him.
Camilla, who had been putting various questions to the coachman, spotted me and rose.
"You have come."
"What have you learned?"
"A number of things."
Kallen brought over a chair.
I waved it off.
"Findel Morein put the coachman to use with divine power a fortnight ago, that is, two days before the cordon was formed. It appears to be a curse that kills him if he speaks of Findel."
"Was it the type where the body deforms if the condition is broken?"
"Yes, that is so. Our priests have taken measures for now."
Deforming a part of the body.
It was a method those bastards of the Luxeon Cult favored.
The one who laid the curse on the lord in Brüs would have been Findel Morein as well.
"A fortnight ago....... Far too late."
"From the circumstances, we surmise it was the day you arrived in Pirberg, Apostle."
Findel had left Brüs a day ahead of us, and had reached Pirberg far faster.
Unless he had wings, it was an impossible claim.
'......Wings?'
No, it might not be entirely impossible.
Could one not tame a monstrous beast using Eladin's divine power?
If it were an aerial monstrous beast rather than a four-legged one like Formel, outstripping us by a wide margin was not entirely impossible.
If such a beast was common enough to be pressed into the hand of the lord of Brüs, there was no reason Findel could not have one too.
'There was never any way to track him to begin with.'
If he truly rode about on some giant bird, there was no way to catch him.
There was a strong chance the coachman himself was a trap of Findel's design.
'......No.'
I had the order of things wrong.
Had he not dug the trap, we would never have known he had been in Pirberg at all.
A trap exists to cut off a tail that has been caught.
But if he had not dug the trap, there would have been no tail to catch in the first place, would there?
Then in the end, this was not a trap.
Which meant that for some reason, he could no longer use the means of travel he had used to come as far as Pirberg.
"The First Corps, then?"
The only possibility I could think of at present was the First Corps, which went about slaughtering every monstrous beast in the vicinity.
'I've received help from an unexpected quarter.'
Had the Talios Order's Pirberg chapter not been large enough to found the First Corps, and had the First Corps not hunted down Findel Morein's familiar, finding Findel Morein would have become a distant hope.
"So, where did he head?"
"He went to Oscalt, apparently."
"Oscalt?"
Oscalt was a fortress city of the Erbern March, far enough away that a round trip on foot would need a month set aside for it.
"The coachman says he left Pirberg with Findel Morein a fortnight ago, arrived in Oscalt five days ago, and returned alone today."
"It'll be tight if we mean to follow."
In Oscalt we could not count on the Talios Order's help.
If by chance he moved once more, finding him would become twice as hard, so we had to follow as quickly as possible.
"Kallen and I leave Pirberg as of today. Unless some particular business comes up, we won't be coming back. Take good care of Drik."
Camilla would play the part of Drik's teacher well.
It was a shame I could not watch his paladin's trial from beside him, but that too was something to be borne.
"......You should travel with the First Corps."
"You can't just drag a knight corps into another domain without warning, can you?"
The First Corps would certainly be a great help, but commanding a large body of troops was no easy thing when every hour counted.
Setting everything else aside, if I brought a knight corps along, Oscalt would assume a war had broken out and bar its gates.
"I will prepare a farewell ceremony at once."
"No need. I don't care for fuss."
"Even so......."
"And there's nothing to gain by delaying further."
Camilla wore the look of someone with a great deal she wanted to say.
She was seeing me off without ever having had the sparring match she had requested a few days earlier, so her feelings were not beyond understanding.
"A pity about the sparring match."
"Ah, it is quite all right."
"A fight with me isn't a pleasant thing. It would only have soured your mood."
Walter, who had blocked an attack swung with my torn-off right arm, had complained of a turned stomach for some time afterward.
"I'll be going, then."
"You are leaving now?"
Camilla stopped me as I was turning away.
I twisted my head to look at her.
"I'll have to pack first, won't I?"
At that somehow deflating remark, Camilla let out a small smile.
"Understood. May your last crusade never come."
The last crusade.
It meant death.
It was a courtesy of the Talios Order, a wish that one not meet a violent, untimely end, but to me the meaning rang quite differently.
What does it mean to tell the Undying not to die?
How does that differ from a curse that one will wander the battlefields forever?
I could not hide the laughter leaking out of me.
"Camilla Rosette. May your last crusade never come."